Study says 63% of Indian employees believe automation will take over process-based work

NEW DELHI: Indian workplaces seem to have woken up to the reality called automation. According to a study by US-based HR firm ADP, nearly 63% of employees in Indian offices believe automation and artificial intelligence will eventually replace people doing process-based, repetitive work.

But that does not deter them because around 61 per cent of those surveyed welcome the automation trend. Employees in India, in fact, were more positive than their counterparts from across Asia in terms of automation, says the ADP survey.

It is no surprise that employees are already thinking about their future in the workplace. Indian employees were found to be more eager than employees across the region to adopt new workplace technologies with 82 per cent of respondents excited about the ability to do all work on a mobile device. About 84 per cent were optimistic about the prospect of using technology to learn anything, anytime anywhere.

"Employees in India, and China, are more likely than workers in Australia and Singapore believe that trends will impact them," says John Antos, VP Marketing, APAC for ADP. “The research indicates that employees in India may be more open to change than their APAC counterparts. This could be a distinct advantage in today’s fast-changing business environment,” says Antos.

The majority of employees in Australia and Singapore were not positive about this technological shift. ADP surveyed employees across North America, Europe, Latin America, and Asia-Pacific to understand how trends are impacting the workplace.

Industry experts are wary of increased automation. According TV Mohandas Pai, increasing automation would shave off 10 per cent of incremental jobs in India's IT sector each year and half of middle-level managers will bear the brunt in the era of artificial intelligence.

A US-based research firm has predicted that India's IT services industry will lose 6.4 lakh 'low-skilled' jobs to automation in the next five years. The $160 billion industry is one of the biggest employment generators in the service sector.

But there is a sliver of hope. The HfS report anticipated that while process-based jobs will perish, the industry will see a 56% increase in high-skilled jobs. Areas which will see high demand and lucrative pay packages are big data, analytics, machine learning, mobility, design, Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence.

Students and fresh graduates can no longer rely on what is being taught in colleges as much of it is fast becoming redundant. Around 80 per cent of engineering graduates today are not industry ready, says.

"People who have got skills in artificial intelligence, machine learning and new coding languages like Python, Android and those in mobile area would do very well in the next five years," Pai pointed out earlier.

IT firms like Infosys and TechM have already gotten in on the act. A top executive at TechM, according to an ET report, said the company had set an automation target internally.

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